Committee chairman Ed Royce (R-Ca) set the tone for the
discussion at Wednesday’s hearing by asserting that “Russia’s
propaganda machine is in overdrive, working to subvert democratic
stability and foment violence in Eastern Europe,” while the
US broadcasting was in “disarray.”

Royce’s choice of witnesses for the committee consisted of Russia
critics Peter Pomerantsev, Helle Dale, and ex-RT journalist Liz
Wahl. This drew criticism from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) who
said he wished that “we had at least one other person to
balance out this in a way that perhaps could’ve compared our
system to the Russian system, to find out where that truth is,
just how bad that is.”

“Russia is engaged in a major effort to, basically, support
its own policies and promote changes and effects on other
populations that further the interests of Russia. I would be
surprised if that wasn’t the case,” Rohrabacher said. Noting
he used to be a journalist himself, Rohrabacher cautioned against
a return to the Cold War mentality. “We don’t need another
Cold War. We don’t need to take that belligerent stance,” he
said.

Peter Pomerantsev, of the London-based Legatum Institute,
disagreed. “Russia has launched an information war against
the West – and we are losing,” he told the committee.

Helle Dale, of the Heritage Foundation, called the content and
commentary from RT and others “polished and slickly
produced,” so that “unsophisticated audiences are eating
it up.” Dale also falsely claimed that RT had a budget of
“$400 million for its Washington bureau” alone. At the
current exchange rate the budget for all of RT’s operations is
$275 million.

Last week, the director of Voice of America (VOA) resigned,
following the resignation of Andrew Lack, CEO of the Broadcasting
Board of Governors (BBG) after just six weeks on the job. Lack
had infamously equated RT
with the Islamic State and Boko Haram, continuing the series of
attacks on RT and Russia by senior US officials.

This is not the first time the US government has invoked inflated
figures of RT’s funding to plead for more funds for the BBG.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said the US was losing the “information
war” to RT and other media. Her successor John Kerry called
RT a “propaganda bullhorn” and asked for hundreds of millions of dollars to
“promote democracy” in Eastern Europe.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, on the other hand,
dismissed RT as having a “tiny, tiny
audience” and representing no threat to a US media space
“full of dynamic truthful opinion.”

Renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky explained
the reasoning behind this seemingly contradictory approach.
“The idea that there should be a network reaching people,
which does not repeat the US propaganda system, is
intolerable” to the US establishment, Chomsky told RT.

“If the House wants to study the weaponization of the media,
they can look right at the front pages of the newspapers that
they get every day,” the MIT professor-emeritus said.“If
we look closely at the conflict [in Ukraine], you can find plenty
of problems on both sides, but the way they’re interpreted here,
is we’re necessarily right about everything. And if anyone’s in
the way, they’re wrong about everything.”